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Can TV Broadcasters Really Go OTT?

Fig. 1: The architecture of a traditional broadcast signal flow vs. one using OTT delivery.

ORANGE, CONN.—The ongoing legal
drama between Aereo and over-the-air
broadcasting operations has been well
documented in the press. However, the
technical impact of a broadcast television
station going completely off-air could also
be significant. Becoming an Internet-only
broadcaster (also known as “over the
top” or OTT), will require a different operational
workflow, and creation of a new
relationship with station viewers. While
there are proven solutions that exist today
to handle all of these technical challenges,
implementing them to work on a 24/7
basis for a large viewing audience may
stretch the technical and financial capabilities
of many broadcasters.

WORKFLOW CHANGES
If a television station was to go off-the-air
completely, workflow changes would
be required. Along with the transmitter
being turned off, the need for MPEG-2 encoding
would go away (unless that format
was still necessary for delivery to CATV
and DTH satellite providers). Instead of
a single ATSC feed (often with multiple
subchannels), the broadcaster would have
to produce feeds at multiple bit-rates in
two or more streaming formats (at least
to handle both Apple and non-Apple devices).
Streams would also have to be created
for each subchannel. These signals
would then need to be fed into a Content
Distribution Network that would create a
copy of a stream to feed to each viewing
device (Internet-connected TV, PC, tablet,
etc.). Fig. 1 compares the architecture of
a traditional broadcast to one using OTT
delivery.

Any new OTT broadcast workflow
would most likely be based on H.264/AVC
using streaming formats such as Apple’s
HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Adobe’s
HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS), with a
possible migration to Dynamic Adaptive
Streaming over HTTP (DASH) if that standard
gains traction in the marketplace.

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But this is all a fait accompli for broadcasters,
according to Jen Baisch, senior
director of product marketing for iStreamPlanet,
a Las Vegas-based provider of
streaming technology. “Broadcasters are
already migrating much of their programming
to OTT, so these technologies are a
move they have to make regardless.”

CONSUMER DEVICES
For the viewer, switching from over-the-air
to OTT can be a significant effort. Any
recent-vintage television set has a built-in
digital tuner that works only with OTA signals.
To receive OTT content, two things
need to be provided: an Internet connection,
and a method to receive a stream and
decode it. Some recent televisions have
built-in Internet TV receivers, but many
others will need some kind of external device
such as a Roku, Xbox, Web-enabled
Blu-ray player or some other device that
can receive and decode the OTT signals.

Some consumers might need to upgrade
their Internet connections, particularly
if multiple televisions are going
to be watched at the same time. With an
inexpensive 3 Mbps Internet connection,
watching two 1 Mbps streams simultaneously
could be difficult for consumers, especially
if other devices were also accessing
the Internet.

Chase Carey, president and COO of News Corp., shook up the NAB Show’s opening session with talk of Fox breaking from the free broadcast model and switching to a subscription-only service.

DATA USAGE
Consumer data caps could interfere
with a viewer’s desire to watch lots of
live programming from an Internet-only broadcaster. These caps are everywhere
for mobile devices connected through
3G/4G LTE mobile networks, and may be
present on some wired Internet services.
Data usage caps are
typically expressed in
terms of gigabytes per
month, with mobile
contracts in the 2-10 gigabyte
range, and some
wired services have
caps in the 200-300 gigabyte
range.

If a live HD stream
runs at 2 Mbps, one
hour of viewing time
on one device amounts
to 0.84 gigabytes of
data consumption. If
the viewer watched
this stream two hours
a day for a month, 50
gigabytes of data would
be consumed. For most
consumers at home using wired Internet,
data usage most likely wouldn’t be a major
problem. For mobile device users, even
those with relatively generous data plans,
watching any significant amount of programming
will be difficult at high bit-rates.

From a provider standpoint, live streaming
to millions of viewers could get expensive.
According to David Tice, senior
vice president of GfK Media & Entertainment,
a Singapore-based media research
firm, “based on the results from our 2012
survey, just over 20 million households in
the U.S. currently receive television exclusively
over the air, with an average of
2.7 television sets per household. Another
17 percent of pay TV households have at
least one television that relies on broadcast.”
With a total of 96 million households
who pay for television service, that figure
represents at least another 16 million televisions
that currently receive their signals
entirely from broadcast, bringing the total
OTA-dependent television population up
to 70 million units.

If OTA-only televisions are distributed
evenly across the United States, a metropolitan
area such as New York (which contains
7.3 percent of the total U.S. population)
could be expected to have a similar
fraction of the OTA-only devices, or 5.1
million sets. If five percent of these sets
were tuned to a broadcaster’s signal (as
could be achieved for a popular sports or
entertainment event) 255,000 OTT video
streams would need to be created.

To generate this quantity of data, a
number of servers and network interfaces
would be required. At 1.5 Mbps per
stream, total traffic volume of 383 Gbps
would be required. There would also be
a cost to deliver these streams, since CDN
services charge for each gigabyte of data
delivered. Although these costs are low for
high volumes of data, they do mount up.
Delivering one hour of programming to
this many viewers at a rate of, say, $.03 per
gigabyte would cost $4,815.00. Another
way to look at CDN costs is to consider
that a viewer who consumed 50 gigabytes
of programming per month would cost a
broadcaster $1.50.

GEO-BLOCKING
Much of a typical broadcast day is made
up of programming that a local broadcaster
doesn’t own, including syndicated game
shows, talk shows, and other programming.
Content rights agreements may limit
a broadcaster to transmitting these signals
only to viewers within a local broadcast
area. Live sporting events pose a similar
challenge, where local households may
need to be prevented from seeing a sporting
event that is subject to blackout rules.
A technology called “geoblocking” is widely
used by CDN providers to control the
geographic locations where live streams
are delivered, although implementing it
securely for millions of viewers could be
challenging.

“Broadcasters will likely need some
sort of player application that can be authenticated
for local viewers in order to
implement geoblocking in a comprehensive
manner,” said Alex Borbely, senior director
of live linear operations for iStreamPlanet.

Overall, the technologies required for
going completely OTT are well established
and available from multiple sources.
The real challenges for broadcasters to go
completely OTT are related to the scale
and cost of the traffic required, and managing
the rights for each viewer; not to
mention the potential loss of viewers who
are unable or unwilling to connect their
televisions to the Internet.